Last year I made slow cooker stew. Brown some cheap meat, throw meat and vegetables and seasoning in a slow cooker, let stew overnight. Wunnerful. There are a lot of variations, but that's the basics of it.

I recently made stuffed artisan bread. The basic dough was an evenish mixture of wheat and rye with pureed broccoli thrown in. I stuffed it with sauteed onions, grilled mushrooms spiced with peppercorns, fresh tomato, and mozzarella before baking it in the oven. It's green in colour, very spicy, and delicious. Now if I only could reproduce the recipe, because I baked this kind of ex tempore and on the fly, improvising just about everything about the recipe.

So, what I did for dinner last night was: I went out and bought two pounds of kale, some stir-fry beef, and walnuts. I got all that home, and got my cast-iron skillet going with olive oil, to which I dropped in and let fry some dill weed, ginger, rosemary, and a spicy garlic mixture I really need to use up faster. Once that had just started to smoke, I chucked in the beef, flash-browning it and making sure it got covered in the spices. I turned down the heat, and dropped in some torn-up-by-hand mushrooms, walnuts, and just a quick splash of soy sauce. Then I covered the whole thing in kale, sprinkled the top of that with a little grated cheese, and let the kale steam over the heat from the meat, nuts, and shrooms. I let that work for about five minutes, then stirred the whole thing up for maybe thirty seconds, and chucked it in bowls.

Fucking awesome. The kale actually did what I'd hoped it would, and took on the steamed flavors of the beef, garlic, and ginger. The cheese got into the little cracks in the kale leaves, and added another layer to the whole thing. I've got more than enough kale left over... I think I kinda want to do this again tonight!

I would have taken pictures, but... I was too busy eating. Maybe tonight?

I've been trying to come up with different ways to use the Bhut Jolokia chili pepper, aka Ghost Chili. I started with the obvious, making pots of angus steak and vegetarian chili. From there, I've tried it in omelets for breakfast, mixed in mustard as a condiment for sandwiches & brats, and in a cream cheese vanilla frosting on cupcakes.

I dunno if I can get crazier than ghost pepper cupcake frosting (!) but lemme see here...

The first thing that comes to my mind is use some of the seeds to make a fiery tomato sauce, cooled off a bit with basil and maybe some cilantro. I can see that just kicking ass with rotini, fusili, or penne, any pasta that scoops up the sauce nicely. Get some shrimp or chicken in that bastard, too. That'd be great. Make you grow hair on your knuckles.

You could make an infusion of it with vodka (or even a cheap whiskey, like a second-to-bottom-shelf bourbon... yeah, that would be pretty good!) and use that for damn-near anytime you need something spiced up. Hmm... what if you used that to make bread, or even homemade pasta? Imbue that with a nice smoky spiciness.

I managed to make no-knead ciabatta yesterday, you know, mostly because it involved very little effort on my part. I got the recipe from here. The only problem I had was that I was too lazy to try to get it into that nice rectangular shape and ended up w/ a loaf of bread bigger than my head. Still tastes awesome though.

I found a good ceviche recipe, I'm thinking about substituting in tuna for the whitefish, to make an appetizer for my filet mignon fajitas. Marinating the filets overnight, grilling to rare while sautéing peppers, onions and portabello mushrooms in a garlic butter, then slicing thin the filets and throwing them in the skillet with the veggies for about 1 minute.

Also, trying to figure out exactly what to put in this stir-fry. I want to tempura fry some shrimp, and maybe make some brown rice, and veggies, but unsure what kind of sauce to make with it. I like the cashew chicken sauce, but haven't been able to nail one from scratch, been having to use pre-packaged stuff, which is eww.

In my experience, oily dark meat fish like tuna, salmon or shark doesn't go well with the traditional lime juice based ceviche. You may want to sear it first and put a bit of soy and ginger in there to play off the umami flavor more. Also consider adding finely diced red onion and/or little dried shrimps to provide some strong flavors to stand up to the tuna.

For the stir fry, try taking a spoonful of cornstarch and shaking the hell out of it with a quarter cup of soy, a bit of orange juice and some rice vinegar and sugar. Heat it up in another pan if you are unsure of it, then stir in at the last minute.